Why do most automobile racing movies fail to excite? Perhaps it’s because the fictional, contrived drama on screen is never as real, nor as interesting, as the drama that takes place on the track.

Sure, Days of Thunder had all the polished action you would expect to find with A-list actors Tom Cruise and Robert Duvall, but it couldn’t hold a candle to the fisticuffs between Cale Yarborough and Donnie Allison at the end of the 1979 Daytona 500. The same goes for the drama-filled 1976 Formula 1 season, which seemingly had it all: Unrelenting danger, exciting technological changes (the six-wheeled Tyrrell P34 debuted that year and was also banned that year) and an intense duel between the reigning champion Niki Lauda in a Ferrari and the upstart James Hunt from McLaren.

Rush, the latest film from Academy Award-winning director Ron Howard (A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13, Cinderella Man, etc.), aims to change the way we think about racing movies. Although the movie doesn’t enter theaters until September 20, if the trailer released days ago is any indication, then we might finally have a racing movie we can cheer about.

Focused on that fateful 1976 F1 championship, Rush pits the calculating Lauda against the flamboyant and hard-living Hunt, who – if the movie’s R rating is any indication – will likely be shown in his full glory, boozing it up six deep in stewardesses. Both drivers were extremely passionate, a feeling that comes across in the snippets portrayed by Daniel Bruhl as Lauda and Chris Hemsworth as Hunt.

Chris Hemsworth at James Hunt in Rush.

Of course, the drama that was the 1976 championship centers around Lauda’s fiery first-lap crash at the German Grand Prix (the last one held at the old 14-mile Nordschleife of the Nurburgring, a.k.a. “The Green Hell”). The impact was so violent that the catch fencing tore off Lauda’s helmet and when the car careened back onto the track, it burst into flames. Two other cars crashed into Lauda and several others stopped to help him, including Arturo Merzario, who dove into the flaming wreckage to free the conscious, though severely injured, Lauda. Read the last rites at the hospital, Lauda returned to race just six weeks later at Monza, bloody bandages still about his head.

Lauda’s commanding championship lead had been cut from 31 to 14 points during his two-race absence and Hunt crawled back to within three points of Lauda before the season-ending Japanese Gran Prix at Fuji. With torrential rains making for atrocious conditions, Lauda stepped out of the car after just two laps and Hunt finished third, just enough to pip Lauda by a single point. Who needs made-up drama when Hollywood can just tell one of the greatest racing stories instead?

Using the real cars, now in the hands of private owners, Howard and company have recreated the racing scene from Formula 1 in the mid-1970s. While the crashes are special effects, the driving scenes are the real deal. Using modern, sophisticated camera cars, incorporating new techniques and working with a budget estimated by IMDB at $38,000,000, the movie seems to really capture the racing feel. Filming on location in Austria, the U.K. and Germany – including at the Nordschleife – certainly had something to do with that.

If the trailer is any indication, Rush might be the first racing movie in recent memory that we won’t roll our eyes at and shrug.